The power of Onlyness – make your wild ideas mighty enough to dent the world….

The denting the world stuff is a very attractive concept to me. I enjoyed the Breaking Out book for the same reasons and tried to pursue John Butman’s ideas about identifying my fascination, creating a framework and breathing the idea with an audience.

In a sense Nilofer Merchant is making a framework for us all in this book and it is an inspiring read packed with case studies of minnows making their dent.

Onlyness is about identifying the thing that only you can be and only you can bring to the work we do together. To believe in this concept, you also need to believe that everyone you work with will be unique and offer useful and different contributions with different motivations – but that doesn’t mean we all need to work in isolation, or some ideas need to rise to the top. Merchant sets out to explore how people have made their dent, why each dent has motivated so deeply in them and to show us a structure for doing it ourselves.

Step 1 is about discovering your onlyness, the power of your own meaning. This is a combination of where you find yourself, your history and upbringing and what they gave you, and your particular passions. In contrast to John Butman, Merchant sees the whole as your uniqueness, not just the particular fascinations that have caused you to pursue ideas.

I have a sense that my onlyness is about South Australia. This is my home and I have made conscious decisions not to stay in other parts of the world, but to return here and entwine my pathway with its. Although my ideas and passions are about our energy transition, there are plenty of folk doing the same thinking as me – far fewer of them are concerned about how South Australia’s particular story pans out.

And Step 1 is not easy, it includes rejection and self doubt but at the end of the journey you know what matter and why. No one in the case studies found their onlyness easily and many found it difficult to accept that this was their work to do. At the end of the chapter she quotes J. Ruth Gendler,

Power made me a coat. For a long time, I kept it in the back of my closet…I didn’t like wearing it much, but I always took good care of it. When I first started wearing it again, it smelled like mothballs. As I wore it more, it started fitting better…

Finding your co-denters is step 2, the power of meaningful relationships. One of the best parts of this book (well for me at least) is the richness of references to studies on networks, leadership, followership and numerous other realms that help cast standard management studies into the theory of onlyness. The overarching message, though, is ‘only not lonely’. Good work is achieved together and working with the right peeps makes any project. You also need to understand how to work with people who don’t share your passion or beliefs as many different folk can be key to the changes you want to make in the world. Finally, building trust is a key to scale.

Part three is about making the dent, acting as one – meaningfully. Galvanising many to care, giving the commission to own it and allowing everyone to bring their onlyness. This section talks to the special type of leadership that people have shown in order to bring about changes that they care deeply about, because more people can usually make a bigger dent.

Overall, this book is inspiring for its instruction to everyone – to be unique and to use that uniqueness to make our own difference in the world. Read and enjoy.

But what do the changes look like without the advocacy? Here are some of the trends we can see right now.

Falling costs of wind and solar means more renewablesWe are on track to meet the Renewable Energy Target earlier than 2020 and capacity beyond the target will be built as renewables projects sign power purchase agreements directly with customers. The prices of solar panels, wind and batteries continue to hit record lows. The residential market is predicted to have its biggest year yet.

We need to remind ourselves that we have gone from a nascent wind industry and virtually zero solar in less than a decade. If change is speeding up, we will see renewable and battery storage penetrations change at remarkable rates over the next decade.

More renewables means a more volatile market
2017 has involved a series of interventions in an attempt to stabilise the electricity system, both physically and financially. The system does not incentivise some of the assets we might need in the long term. Seasonal storage, dispatchable supplies, smart control systems and interactive loads.

In the meantime, there is a dip in prices through the day as the solar glut gets larger. And there is a strong peak in prices after sunset. The other half of pricing, networks, has little downward pressure as SA Power Networks prepares its case for pricing from 2020 – 2025.

The storage conversation is growing
There is increasing recognition of the need for storage. (the need for demand response, which can offer the same service to some extent is talked about but not so loudly). We have had good coverage of the Tesla big battery and studies to build pumped hydro schemes. The early adopters are buying batteries for their houses and experimenting with different models for how they interact.

Ultimately we need daily load shifting (with either storage or flexible load management), we need week by week balancing and we need some interseasonal storage to bring summer surplus into winter.

The gap between the haves and have-nots is widening
Many advocates are concerned that the cost of electricity is disproportionately falling to those who can’t afford solar and batteries. Our energy-intensive businesses cannot afford to carry the burden of an inefficently priced system either.

The changes in our energy system and the lack of alignment to deal with changes point to a rocky road ahead. Of course, changes always spell opportunity for some. I’m hoping the relatively blank slate can become an opportunity for communities to write their own energy future, You can read more about that here.

The anecdotal evidence for these assertions comes in part from my Churchill Fellowship looking at community energy systems around the world.

This post aims to summarise those three themes.

Let’s start with some definitions. When I say local scale, I am talking about something that is bigger than an individual site and smaller than the centralised model we have at the moment. When I say energy, I am starting my thinking with the electricity system which is well on its way to going 100% renewable but expanding to include transport, heat and other energy uses that may ultimately use a combination of electricity and renewable fuels. When I say community I am keen to see people back at the heart of this essential service through its governance, ownership and investment.

We are racing toward a clean energy future, as we need to. South Australia’s electricity grid is an excellent-sized example of a whole system. It has relatively weak interconnection to the systems interstate (~25% of our peak needs) and therefore needs the capability to be self-sufficient. And we are experiencing the challenges of an energy system in transition on a regular basis.

I imagine a future system with solar energy in every neighbourhood. Enough to give a place minimum energy self sufficiency, combined with local storage. Storage can take the form of batteries but also energy that can be stored in its final form, like hot water and the thermal inertia of our buildings. I imagine each community having adequate local control systems to run independently if needed and to optimise supply and demand on a daily basis. I envisage significant large scale solar and wind offering cheap power, particularly to our major industries. Our local systems would be well positioned to exploit the times of cheap power. This positioning will improve as we add transport and heating energy to our electricity demand and as we generate renewable fuels from electricity as one of the components that provides long term storage of energy. Finally I imagine large scale storage from different battery technologies, solar thermal and pumped hydro to provide the balancing factor that we will need at different time periods – daily, weekly and seasonally.

So how is local energy more affordable?

At both the centralised and individual ends of a spectrum it is difficult to match supply to demand. Our state electricity system has an average load of roughly half our peak, 1500MW with of a peak of 3,000MW. This means half our network asset lies idle much of the time. At an individual scale you need to over-invest in generation and storage in order to cover all eventualities.

The opportunity at a community scale is to

have diverse assets – generation from different sources and a number of forms of storage,

have a better chance of matching loads to supply because there are more loads to choose from with differing needs and operating patterns

treat the local network as an asset to be optimised as well

reduce the demand on the high voltage network while using it to a lesser extent to benefit from cheap generation (eg surplus wind) and back up supply

have an incentive to reduce costs through further energy efficiency and demand shifting

Prices don’t fall until we reduce our contributions toward the centralised generators and high voltage network but this is key to diverting our investments into local assets and using them well. I’ve written on this topic a number of times.

Is local energy more reliable?

One of the drivers for adding batteries to a solar household is energy security. There is nothing more annoying about being subjected to a blackout when you own a perfectly good generator on your roof. Batteries can fix the limitations of solar panels and supply your load during times when the grid is not available. The duration of this service might depend on how well charged your battery was at the time of the blackout.

A community approach to reliability reduces everyone’s reliance on the main network at the lowest possible cost. Diversity in our energy needs help a community balance its system during normal operation and in a similar manner, diversity in needs and energy availability during a potential blackout can help with managing priorities and ensuring available supplies are suitably rationed to last.

The energy system always grapples with the right amount of energy security because any more comes at a much higher cost. One of the ways we can break this down is to provide different levels of energy security for different energy needs. This won’t happen at a centralised level. The system is simply too slow and remote from customers to explore these opportunities with communities. If I could provide 99.9% service for my essential needs and only 95% for my flexible and luxury needs, the system could be a whole lot cheaper.

Will local energy make the system fairer?

Australia is currently seeing a swing from the ‘market will provide’ philosophy back toward discussions of planning and essential services. We’ve lost all the policy making infrastructure to really have a good conversation about fairness.

There have been a few low-income initiatives in the energy space recently but nowhere near enough and not as part of a larger take on energy market reform. One of the benefits of community energy can be to experiment with ways that a community brings everyonealong on the path to a clean energy future.

This was a really interesting read for me. Trying to put myself in the mind of someone who has tracked technology since the beginning of the internet and understand what he is trying to say.

The trends Kelly identifies are not about the technology that delivers them. They are about the intertwining of our technical and social systems and how they end up looking different over time. I wanted to write this blog to record the 12 trends so that I could come back and ponder them as they reveal themselves as trends in my life and experiences.

Becoming: nothing is static, it is always heading toward a destination – it is always becoming. The example here is continual updates. No longer do we buy once and stop. We instead maintain a system through updates. Or we access SAAS offering which are continually updated behind the scenes. Understanding that its a process rather than a destination will help us rethink what we try to build. Of course the big trend missed in the 90’s was how many people would provide the content of the internet. the big media companies thought they were the controlling force. This diverse human creativity is part of the reason our technology is always becoming.

Cognifying: Artificial intelligence is coming at us. Like the internet of the 90’s, we are only just starting to understand some of the ways this could change things. If we can hand over cognitive grind, what would we prioritise with out time? Letting robots into our lives, finding ways they can help us, finding things they can do that we couldn’t… is all part of the future. “let robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters”

Flowing: This is rich chapter and grapples with the ways we discover value when copying stuff is ubiquitous and free. In many ways this has been the challenge of the media companies since the dawn of the internet and Kelly imagines the death of static in favour of ways that our media “flows” and morphs continually. He cites generative values that are generated at the point of exchange: immediacy, personalisation, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, discoverability. And he argues there are 4 stages of flowing: Fixed,Rare. Free,Ubiqitous. Flowing,Sharing. Opening,Becoming.

Screening: This is a trend predicted in The Circle. Our interaction interface is becoming screens for so many dimensions of our lives. Kelly paints a picture of watches, glasses, VR relaxation, desktops, kitchens and tables all screening at us continually throughout the day.

Accessing: Access becomes more important than ownership. Real time, on demand, decentralised. through platforms and in the cloud. The digital native with complete freedom from possessions and flexibility in choices and lifestyles.

Sharing: Like Clay Shirky, Kelly recognises that sharing is easy and it becomes harder as you move up to Cooperation, Collaboration and finally Collectivism. But now that sharing has become the norm we will continue to move through to bigger outcomes.

Filtering: More filtering is inevitable as we produce more, overwhelming content. Everyone is trying to tweak the algorithm to get their stuff in front of you. But we will make new ways to filter and personalise so that we can get what we need.

Remixing: We know that remixing is leading to new approaches. There is an ongoing conversation about IP and copyright and whether they hinder our social progress. Kelly’s bold statement is that ” In 30 years, the most important cultural works and the most powerful mediums will be those that have been remixed the most”.

Interacting: Virtual reality has a long way to go but has also come a long way. It will get better with more senses, more intimacy and more immersion. Interactivity will be considered the norm and if something doesn’t interact smartly it will be considered broke.

Tracking: This is where data collection is taking us. Enormous amounts of information that we can use to better understand ourselves, our collective behaviour and our world. This is what the internet of things will do.

Questioning: Questioning is more powerful than answering and Kelly gives a list of reasons a good question helps us progress. This is the basis for asserting that questioning is a skill for the future.

Beginning: In a sense much of the story thus far is aimed at demonstrating how we are only just seeing the inklings of what is possible. Indeed, we are at the beginning…

If you like thinking about the future, and don’t mind a bit of techno-utopia, this is a book to read.

Giving a TEDx talk was a wonderful experience. The speakers were so well supported by the Adelaide team and they really do put together a great show. My thanks and gratitude to everyone who was involved. I fluffed a few lines, which I’ve corrected in the Transcript below. If you didn’t make it on the day, please enjoy and I’d love if you feel inspired to share the talk with others #TEDxAdelaide 2017.

(my blog is full of posts about decentralised energy and reforming our energy system – here is a starting point on the case for community energy)

Transcript

Together, we are racing towards a clean energy future. Renewable energy is now cheaper than coal, oil and gas. On an enormous scale, we are building some of the biggest wind and solar systems in the country

But I see roadblocks ahead

At the other end of the spectrum, we have solar panels on the rooves of millions of homes. The cost of solar energy and battery systems is falling fast

I see roadblocks over here too

And as we’ve been tugged between big energy and small energy, we’ve all experienced some of those roadblocks haven’t we?

We’ve had blackouts

We’ve seen energy bills soar sky high

And we’ve been subjected to a confusion of political opinions

Bigger is not better when it comes to energy, tiny isn’t great either.

Here in the middle is a sweet spot. If we build energy at a local scale it can be cheaper, more reliable and fairer. Here in the middle is a sweet spot called community energy.

Last year I traveled the world looking at the changes in energy systems in America, Germany, Denmark, the UK (and Japan). South Australia is not the only place hitting roadblocks. Everyone is grappling with a transition from dirty energy to clean energy. I visited communities that are building better energy systems and communities that are demanding changes in the way our energy systems are owned and operated. We have more sunshine here in South Australia than most of the places I visited. We’re in such a great position to lead the way. Already half of our electricity comes from wind and solar and incredibly a third of our homes already have solar panels on their roof.

But we can’t lead the way unless we head to the right spot, unless we head to the right sized system. (we need to head for the sweet spot of energy at the local scale.)

Let me show you why

Community energy can be more reliable.

With big energy systems, we have enormous power stations that transport their energy a long way to the end user. A few critical faults in the system and we have what we had last year, the whole state went black. And if you had a solar panel on your roof at home, you couldn’t use it because of the black grid. Maybe you had a battery or a backup power system but you couldn’t share that energy with your neighbours.

I imagine our electricity system of the future as a network of community energy systems. An energy internet if you will. Because networks provide different ways to get around a fault when it occurs. (Emergency supplies can be local or maybe come from your neighbouring suburb. Either way, we share the cost of the backup across the whole neighbourhood and manage our essential needs when the time comes.)

This is what they are looking at building in New York, a series of microgrids. Because New York had its wake up call when Superstorm Sandy hit. And some of their inner city suburbs, some of their poorest suburbs, were without power for two weeks. (New York set about solving the problem by building microgrids,) And they realised that the best way to reduce the vulnerability of those communities was to give them some energy self sufficiency. The cheapest way to improve the reliability was to invest locally.

Now it’s not just our emergency supplies that we need to share. We can share our energy assets on a day to day basis and be far more efficient. Because we are the ones that pay for inefficiency. And in the big energy model and the small energy model, there’s plenty of inefficiency.

Big energy has always chased economies of scale, promising you cheaper prices, if they build bigger power stations. But they’ve had to build power stations and networks, poles and wires, to meet our peak capacity on that one hottest day in the middle of summer.

Half of that capacity lies idle most of the time. (and on top of that we lose almost 10% of our electricity transporting it from where it is produced to where it is used.)

Small energy is not much better. They’ve chased the economies of mass production. The more solar panels and batteries we produce, the cheaper they can become. But to serve our needs all year round we have to overinvest in the capacity here. So once again, some of that capacity lies idle.

Here in the middle at a local energy scale we can best match the energy we have with the energy we use and we can make the whole system more efficient.

Samso island in Denmark provides a nice little example. They wanted to roll out a renewable heating scheme to an entire village. But they said to every house on the scheme, “we won’t connect you until you’ve improved your energy efficiency by 25%” Then the system they built could be smaller. And the resource, the local straw, could go further.

Finally, the most important thing to get right, is making our system fair. And at the moment, its growing more unfair.

Big energy has become accustomed to sucking value out of our communities, off to head office and back to shareholders. Australia’s first community owned energy supplier has estimated that, of the $300 million dollars spent in their community, they can keep $80 million dollars circulating locally, simply because they are owned and operated in the community.

Small energy, is not much better. And I’m part of the problem too. I own solar panels and the more I use my solar energy, the less I contribute to the operation of the poles and wires that connect our system together. The people paying the most towards our electricity system are those who wholly rely on it. People on low income, renters and other people who can’t afford (install) solar; The businesses and industries that provide our jobs and local services that don’t have space or capital to build their own power station.

In Germany, communities are buying back their electricity grids from the energy corporates, and they’re demanding that those systems answer to community priorities. In Scotland, communities are investing in renewable energy because they know it helps their local economy flourish as industries spring up around this new opportunity.

I said at the beginning that it was economics driving the pace of change towards a clean energy future. We can harness the economics of local energy. We can draw big energy back towards the centre, we can help small energy share and participate in our communities.

When we build our clean energy system from our neighbourhoods out, we will get a system that is cheaper, more reliable and fairer. We will generate numerous local benefits. We will put energy back into service for our jobs, our lifestyles in our cities and our towns.

Our clean energy future will arrive faster than any of us dare to predict. But we need to listen to our roadblocks. Those roadblocks are telling us that now is a critical time. They’re telling us that now is the time for us to find our sweet spot. They’re telling us that this is the most important time for us to unlock the benefits of community energy.

Why do women work hard and then put their career successes down to luck? Jamila Rizvi sets out to do more than expose the workplace gender inequities that exist, she also hopes to offer useful strategies for women.

This is inevitably a tricky task. Not only do women come to the workplace with a spectrum of personalities and differing strategies, we are also from a range of generations. The early part of this book emphasises the socialisation that dictates so many of womens’ differences from men. While Rizvi doesn’t mention generational differences, she is refreshingly young but has been in the workplace long enough to be jaded. Even with the advantages of a 90’s upbringing that promised less differences between men and women’s opportunities, Rizvi has experienced the ways that the workforce pulls women back into line. Because socialisation, while dramatic during our formative years, is an ongoing process and in the workforce it continues to reinforce the dominant position enjoyed by men and the socialisation that men have enjoyed.

Rizvi does an admirable job of this tricky task. She explains the necessary generalisations up front, acknowledges that men may experience many of the issues she raises and cautions that she can’t speak for the compounded issues faced by women minorities. She doesn’t shy away from intersectionality though and fulfills the important job of pointing out additional challenges women of colour and women with disabilities may face throughout the book.

One of the first things we need to rediscover is our confidence. Rizvi highlights that the modus operandi for being a top student at school does not apply in the workplace. The unconscious bias, the rewards to competitiveness and those who big-note themselves, adjust the playing field in men’s favour. Simply delivering good work and hoping to be rewarded does not cut it. And for girls that have thrived in the school environment, this can batter their confidence, being thrust into a game they are ill-equipped to play.

So we find out what confidence sounds like. We can’t help the unconscious bias that privileges men’s deep voices and sets different standards for men and women in the extent they are allowed to dominate the conversation. But there are a bunch of practical steps we can take to speak confidently, hold our space and create an assertive meeting style.

We learn what confidence looks like. For a start, step outside of society’s expectations and understand the clothes that are going to make you feel comfortable and confident in.

And we learn what confidence feels like – with a shout out for the value of vulnerability and a call for workplaces where feelings can be useful. After all no one feels confident if they know they are faking it all the time.

The book continues to cover the challenges that everyone faces in the workplace, but are especially acute for women and the way we have been socialised. And it keeps its promise of offering practical steps for dealing with each challenge. It is definitely worth a read for women at the start of their career, or those who don’t yet believe in themselves. Even some of us who feel set in our ways might like to reflect on the little things that can bring us more personal power. It’s the many small strategies and the eyes wide open to bias that might give us future generations who can admire their success as a product of their talents and hard work instead of ever suggesting they were ‘just lucky’.

Six Councils from the Adelaide Hills to Kangaroo Island are calling for ideas for a community energy program. Victor Harbour has already run two community bulk buy programs for solar and is especially interested to see an offering that will scale, to speed the region to a more future proofed energy system.

The region spends around $300m per year on electricity. In a similar sized region, Enova Energy (Australia’s only community-owned electricity retailer) estimated that it could keep $80m in the local economy. This is the prize for a good community energy program. It is captured by

creating savings for electricity customers that are re-spent locally.

Helping everyone to own rooftop solar and profit from their own investments.

creating local energy jobs, inside the retail business, in delivering energy projects and also advice and installations to energy customers.

developing skills and capacity, ultimately creating products and services that can be exported.

Transferring ownership of energy projects to local shareholders and ensuring that the use of local resources produces benefits for these communities.

Tandem Energy has partnered with Enova Energy to tender for the community energy program. We see the program consisting of many local energy projects across the region and we think there are two foundational projects that facilitate everything else:

– a local retailer that can buy and sell local energy, can help customers reduce their energy costs and can provide the contracts that underpin long term investments.

– a local, ‘community-benefit’ organisation (Hills and Coasts Community Energy) that can be the project delivery agent – bringing in external ideas and expertise, designing the approach that will best suit the community and then delivering in ways to localise the benefits and ensuring approaches become community energy projects over time.

Tandem and Enova will be the project delivery agent in the first instance and here are some of the many projects we’d love to get started on. Some of these would rely on grants or Council budget and others are commercial propositions so the project delivery work could be funded once the project proceeds and some profit could be returned to make Hills and Coasts Community Energy self sufficient for funding.

Community owned retailer

Organisation – Hills and Coasts Community Energy

Solar Bulk Buy

Removing barriers for those currently excluded from the market

Micro-grids

Community scale solar and wind

Energy security for emergency and other key community facilities

Energy Education

Energy Opportunities – Master planning, feasibility and analysis

Community Energy Action Planning

Climate Ready Homes

Low Income and Renewables for All Energy program

Regional Energy hubs for economic development

Business Energy Audits and solarisation

Energy Project Community Finance

Energy Project Innovation Lab

You can read all about the ways other regions are delivering these types of projects in this document.

Would your organisation like to partner with us in delivering any of these projects?

We are looking for organisations that are local to one of the six Councils and can therefore help us demonstrate our commitment to localising the economic benefits over time.

We are also looking to partner with organisations that have a unique community energy offering and we could work together to develop a suitable project in the region.

If that’s you – please get in touch. While we wait to hear about enthusiasm for our tender, we are collecting a list of potential partners and supporters. You can give us your details via this form. You can subscribe to our (roughly monthly) community energy news which will report on progress, or you can email me at heather[at]changingweather.com.au